Dual Use Quotes

By developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies.

Every technology that can improve the human condition could harm the human condition. Someone evil could program a robot to hurt people.

Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

Someone once told me that religion is like a knife: You can stab someone with it, or you can slice bread with it.

Any powerful technology has sauce for the goose and the gander... It's just an extension of humanity.

So terrible a weapon simply had to have an important peaceful use ... We were grimly determined to prove that this discovery was not just a weapon.

The very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used to undermine us and inflict great harm.

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so

Biological science is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for good or bad. It’s like a knife blade with three edges: The edge that cuts, the dull edge that does not cut well and the edge that cuts what you do not want it to.

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

Almost all the golf courses in Staten Island double as something else.

Whenever technological advancement is made it can always be used both for good or for bad.

As for the "triumphs of science," let us honour, with astonishment and awe, the genius of those who invented them; but let us remember that the things themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can kill our enemy, but with which also our enemy can kill us.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Like any tool [drugs] can help you or hurt you.

Every time there's a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it's used.

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with a torpedo or a toy.

That atomic energy though harnessed by American scientists and army men for destructive purposes may be utilised by other scientists for humanitarian purposes is undoubtedly within the realm of possibility. ... An incendiary uses fire for his destructive and nefarious purpose, a housewife makes daily use of it in preparing nourishing food for mankind.